The day starts shouting before you've decided what matters.
The founder started every day buried. The calendar, the inbox and a dozen Slack channels all shouted at once, with no sense of what actually mattered — so the first hour went to triage instead of the things only they could do. Double-bookings slipped through, and the scheduling back-and-forth quietly ate the gaps between meetings.
The fix would have been a chief of staff — someone to read the day, guard the calendar, and surface only what needed a decision. At forty people, that wasn’t a hire they could justify yet. So the important threads kept getting answered last, and focus time kept losing to whoever booked it first.
